


Smile About the Dead

by MaryFlanner



Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Wholock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 05:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryFlanner/pseuds/MaryFlanner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Yes, well, bit different, right?” he says with a forced laugh.  “Didn’t exactly take him to bed, now, did I?”</p>
<p>Rose pulls him tighter, stubborn in her affection.  “Me neither.  Still loved him, though.”  And then, much softer: “Still do.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile About the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Timing: Shh. Don't think too hard. In Whoverse, it takes place between "The Parting of the Ways" and "Journey's End." In Sherlock, it's post-fall.
> 
> Thank you to my Brit-picker Hazyjayne and my beta Romanticnerd and my soulmates What Larks and Nielrian.
> 
> Title from "The Convert" by G.K. Chesterton. Beautiful.

She’s not his type, really. Despite the clothes and shoes that he knows cost something, there’s something a bit chav about her, tamped down though it is. Maybe it’s the bottled blond, the scowl, her bearing. Something. She’s not always lunched in places like this one. But for some reason, meeting her black eyes across a mouthful of spinach salad, John can see there’s something they have in common besides trying to forget a childhood spent in council flats. Something sad and weary and...bored.

  
“Hello,” he says, still getting used to the stiff slide of new fabric across his outstretched wrist (why wear a shooting jacket if you’re not going to be shooting anymore?) “I’m John. Haven’t seen you here.”

  
She takes his hand, and they way her eyes flick over him, assessing, learning, goes straight up the back of his neck.

  
“Rose,” she says, and after a pause: “Have a seat?”

She’s constantly alert, constantly distracted, and John tries not to think too hard about why that makes a few of the dozens of heavy knots he ignores in his stomach unspool. They have dinner two nights later at a place he’d been before (but never with a woman) and he likes her wide smile, full of teeth, and her accent, and her clothes, half a step too casual for this place.

  
“D’you travel?” she asks, suddenly fully engaged, when he mentions that naan is so much better when made by an Afghan grandmother. It’s not just interest, though. There’s an urgency, an alarm, a need for him to say yes in her that he can’t really understand.

  
“Military,” he says. “You?”

  
“Yeah, have done. Quite a lot.” Her eyes dart away and John has so learned to love a mystery.

  
“Really?” he prods, gently. “Where?”

  
She laughs sharply, a little awkward. “Everywhere. You wouldn’t believe...” She stops, turns her smile inward.

  
“Oh, I don’t think you’d believe what I’d believe.”

  
She studies him slowly, warmly. For the first time, something genuine and open is in her face. “Yeah,” she says softly. “I suppose you might.”

She knows who he is, of course. She confesses as much. He groans.

  
“I suppose I’ll always been the mad detective’s sidekick. Bachelor John Watson.”

  
“S’ not so bad, being a sidekick,” she says with a grin. “Heroes need them. Keeps them human.”

  
John laughs. “Most wouldn’t exactly describe Sherlock Holmes as ‘human.’”

  
She opens her mouth to say something but stops and asks instead how they met. He tells her the entire baffling story, giving voice to it for the first time. Reveling in the utter ridiculousness; the beautiful absurdity of them. She laughs until she has to wipe away tears, seeming to get...something, though he can’t say what.

  
“I mean,” he says, gesturing broadly, “What was I to do--a madman I’d just met pops up and tells me to run.”

  
Rose holds his gaze a bit too long and swallows. Suddenly, he’s not so sure all the dampness in her eyes is from mirth. “Well, I’d say you run. And don’t look back.”

  
“No,” John says, letting the crumpled end of his napkin drop with a fond smile. “Certainly don’t look back.”

  
After that, there’s comfortable melancholy to the evening. He’s not asked what it is she’s lost, and she isn’t saying, so he lets it go and is just grateful for some company that doesn’t expect too much from him. After a silent cab ride to her flat, she seems a little surprised that she asks him to come up, and he’s a little surprised to find himself saying yes.

She works a lot, for the government, she says, but doesn’t talk about it. Her flat is empty of souvenirs from her travels, but her canniness and worldliness convince him she wasn’t lying about that. A bit of recognition here, a casual phrase there. There’s so much more to her than she’s telling, but she doesn’t ask about Sherlock, and he does appreciate that so. He offers her the same courtesy of silence.

  
Their first three dates are much the same. They always go to her place after. His new flat is clean and tidy and functional and so, so him. So him, so only him. It’s nice on an aesthetic level, but if he’s not careful, it feels like mocking. He doesn’t fall apart because he doesn’t think about it. He’s not a stranger to death, and to loss, and even to regret. He’s seen it every single day for years, and in the war, in much more horrible ways to much younger, gentler men. Sometime, at night, if he’s at home, his very quiet, very tidy, very much not intruded upon at odd hours room starts to feel too big and a dark grief starts creeping in around the edges. He thinks about the war then. He imagines the faces he’s buried to keep that last one at bay. The mangled bodies and broken screams are a balm for that elegant, silent peace he saw in that sharp, unblemished face--in those empty, quinine eyes.

  
It’s peace that breaks them both one night. Date four, far too much wine, spent, naked, sprawled across her bed at 2 a.m. They have, dangerously, become comfortable.

  
“He was a doctor,” she says into the dark. John’s fingers wind through her yellow hair as they both stare into the moon blued ceiling.

  
“Sorry?” John asks, not certain but suspecting. Dying to know and not wanting to, all at once.

  
“He took me places--everywhere,” she continues with wide, unseeing eyes. “That’s how I traveled. With my Doctor.”

  
The utter sadness in her voice breaks his heart, then mends it with it familiarity. “What happened?” he asks.

  
“I lost him,” she says, voice shaking. “He’s gone now. I lost him. Forever.”

  
He pulls her close, knowing on an intellectual level that this should feel wrong, this should be awkward, this should be not good. But it’s just so right that she should ache this way with him. He’s grateful. She sobs into his neck and he feels something pop like a thread pulled taut at the end of a stitch. For the first time since that day at the grave, he cries.

  
After a moment, she pulls away a bit, self conscious. “Sorry,” she says, sniffing, wiping her face. “Sorry. You’ve lost someone too, I suppose.”

  
John tries--he really, really tries--to make light of it. “Yes, well, bit different, right?” he says with a forced laugh. “Didn’t exactly take him to bed, now, did I?”

  
Rose pulls him tighter, stubborn in her affection. “Me neither. Still loved him, though.” And then, much softer: “still do.”

  
Hours later, her words chase each other in frantic screams and insidious whispers through his head. Rose sleeps peacefully, ear pressed against the beat of his shattered heart.

And then, one day, she doesn’t answer his texts. He leaves a message or two over the course of a week, but doesn’t press it and doesn’t make a fuss. He’s sad to see her go, but is also relieved that the inevitable end was so uncomplicated. So natural. He liked her. He liked her willingness and her curiosity. But mostly he liked her stoic grief, so strangely like his own. They’d both known they were mending borrowed hearts, and some days, John’s not entirely sure what that means. The meaning, though, is irrelevant. Any water he’s treading over these misspent months of maddening, baffling feelings is entirely under the bridge. There was never anyone like Sherlock Holmes, and now there literally is no one like him. This cacophony in his chest is fine the way it is and warrants no sorting or further thought. If the colors of his ordinary life seem a bit duller, he at least knows he’s not alone in tasting ash and that is, for now, enough. He goes on as he ever did and ever will and tries to let the smell of stale tea and rubbing alcohol evaporate into the past.

He sees her again one day, coming out of a chip shop, fingers linked with a messy haired man. He smile is wider than he’d ever seen it, and there’s a lightness to her he almost doesn’t recognize.

  
“John! Hullo!” she calls as he’s deciding whether or not to duck away.

  
“Rose,” he says in genuine delight. “Good to see you. You’re looking fantastic.”

  
“And you!” She returns, giving his arm a quick squeeze. “Oy, I’m rude! John, this is,” she laughs. “Well, this is John. My Doctor.” Her voice leaves no room for doubt in John’s mind who exactly this doctor is.

  
“John,” she continues, going a bit giggly, “This John. He’s, likewise, a doctor.”

  
“Hello!” he says brightly, shaking John’s hand. “Got a bit of type, have we, Rose Tyler?” he adds with a wink.  
“Doctor!” she giggles, lost in her own bliss. John finds himself really, truly very happy for her, even as something inside him breaks a little.

  
“How’ve you been?” she asks with genuine concern. “Sorry I--”

  
“No, no. None of that. Quite worth your time I see,” he smiles. “I’m good. No. I’m not good. But I’m better. I’m definitely better.”

  
Rose nods, lips pressed thin against watery eyes. “S’good. I’m glad...I-- Maybe you could come round some time? Have tea?”

  
John nods and looks over her shoulder at the lanky man in an overcoat with brilliant, mad eyes and knows for certain he never will. “Sure, of course. I’m just. Well. Busy. You know.”

  
She nods. “Right. You must be. Busy. Awfully.”

  
John rocks back on his heels, already stepping back, retreating. “Right. So. Good to see you, Rose. Good to meet you, doctor.”

  
John the Doctor shakes his hand. “Likewise, doctor.”

  
John watches them walk away, Rose laughing at something her doctor says with big, sweeping arms and a near-shouted “Brilliant!” He wonders how miracles happen and wishes with a growing acceptance of its futility that another one would find him. He stares blankly through the cab window at the grey city, shooing back the dark ache that threatens to rise fully into his consciousness, not know that one is looking for him.

Right now.


End file.
